The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 36]

I649-I666] RECOLLECT MISSIONS, 1646-60

the guilty person; and the other, that the delinquent
shall not lose his reputation by the declaration of his
fault. Charity urges him to remove his subordinate
from danger. If that regular administers without
canonical institution and subjection to the ordinary,
everything will be settled very easily, and justice and
charity will be satisfied without any infamy to the
criminal or any dishonor to the order. But if he is
subject to the ordinary, the provincial cannot remove
him by his own authority; but he must have recourse
to the ordinary himself, and to the vice-patron, and
then those two agree on the removal. In that case,
what can the provincial say to them? If he should
say that he will impart to them in all secrecy the
[nature of the] crime of his subject, that means is
harsh and less safe. The ordinary and the governor,
as the father and the master, may correct and punish
the faults of their inferiors without the least wound
to their honor; and must a provincial do so by disaccrediting his subordinate with the heads of the
community? If it is decided that the superior do
not tell the kind of crime, but that he asseverate in
general terms that there is cause to remove the
religious from that place, the trouble is not avoided.
First, they may think that he speaks thus in order to
go ahead with his oldtime custom; second, because
even though the cause of removing him be not a
fault, it can easily be alleged to be one, and the fact
that he does not offer more explanation in that case
comes to be the same as manifesting its gravity by his
silence. Finally, honor is very delicate and is lessened by rumor and suspicion. Since God made the
religious exempt from the secular judges, and the
apostolic see exempted them from the ordinaries, the